the terraferma state 101
and lasting mobilization especially of rural resources, also important
for more systematically organized militia bodies. The high point of such
mobilization of resources for defense needs was from about 1600 to 1630.
Construction work was no longer a priority, but perennial security worries
in the mainland peaked in wars on the terraferma’s frontiers: the Gradisca
war of 1615–17 and the Mantuan succession war in 1629–30. Also, there
was a gradual, permanent proportional increase in the contribution of
mainland-levied revenues to overall state spending.
Defense preoccupations mixed with economic and environmental
concerns to expand intervention by central government in control over
mainland resources and vigilance on forces of nature, especially but
not only in areas nearer Venice.31 Action concerning watercourses and
marshes brought diversion of rivers to avoid silting up the Venetian
lagoon, attempts to prevent them flooding, authorization and support for
sometimes massive land drainage schemes, and concession of irrigation
rights. Policy towards woodland aimed to reserve much timber for state
arsenal use and to counter deforestation. Concern with mainland com-
munities’ common property sought to preserve public rights and current
forms of use against alienation and conversion to arable. Partly akin to
these preoccupations, given its implications for security, was emerging
coordination of public health policy, particularly evident in the plague
emergencies of 1575–77 and 1629–31. These novel trends in government
action brought—especially from mid-16th century—both the creation of
new central agencies with competence for solely or prevalently dominion
matters and growing mainland intervention by other agencies, new and
old, with a more state-wide brief: magistracies responsible for the Arse-
nal, therefore, as too for grain, timber and woodlands, public health, artil-
lery, waters policy (1501), fortifications (1542), beni inculti or fallow land
(1556/58), common property (1574).
More numerous and specialized central agencies coincided with the
development of more sophisticated tools of government, as in the sys-
tematic presentation and preservation in Venice of written reports by
governors returning from the dominions (introduced in 1524) and the
growing use of cartography and of descriptive surveys of forests, common
31 Knapton, “Tra Dominante e dominio”; Karl Appuhn, A Forest on the Sea. Environ-
mental Expertise in Renaissance Venice (Baltimore, 2009); Raffaello Vergani, “Venezia e la
Terraferma: acque, boschi, ambiente,” in Del Torre and Viggiano, eds., 1509–2009. L’ombra
di Agnadello, pp. 173–93.